June 10, 2010

Wilder Publications warns readers of its
reprints of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Common
Sense, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist Papers, among
others, that “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today.”

The disclaimer
goes on to tell parents that they "might wish to discuss with their
children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before
allowing them to read this classic work."

Obviously, these fools need to be briefed on the Constitution by the greatest scholar ever:

Oh, and I have a disclaimer as well and a message to the publishing house:more...

I don't know which is funnier...the fact that someone from the White House said that the unions had "flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet" in trying to beat Blanche Lincoln, or that Vale could even say that with a straight face.

June 08, 2010

Saint George Tiller was a moral center

I get that some people consider access to abortion services necessary, or even A Good Thing when it's just too inconvenient to give up nine months of your life to gestation. But really? Abortion as a spiritual experience? Does the author really think that God is watching and smiling and guiding abortionists' hands as they rip babies out of their mothers' wombs?

I was going to excerpt this, but go read the whole thing. I couldn't have written a better exaggeration of delusion if I'd dropped a couple of hits of acid, drank a fifth of Val-U-Rite, and started typing as the stream of consciousness flowed in rainbow waves from my fingertips as my hands became one with the keyboard.

The "progressive community" is apparently "fretting" about the retirement of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, according to the Puffington Host:

Her absence will be felt "significantly," said Ilyse Hogue, Communications Director of Moveon.org. "The burden will fall on the rest of the press corps to make sure the administration feels the need to be transparent about its plans to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan."

Say, I'd like to get us out of those countries, too, but I have a feeling that Ms. Hogue isn't exactly looking for the same kind of conditions that our troops are. I mean victory.

"Even though the anger toward her and her retirement are entirely appropriate, the absence of her raw questions about the war(s) will be felt by the anti-war movement, and everyone else," said Peter Daou, an influential online voice, formerly of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. "The chummy atmosphere between the White House press corps and the past two administrations (a case in point was the giddy response to Gibbs joining Twitter) hasn't been conducive to the kind of blunt questions she was willing to ask."

Um, Pete, how about the question she apparently wasn't willing to ask during all these years?

Normally, you'd think that adding 431,000 jobs to our economy in a single month would be reason to jump up and down with joy for the massive upturn in our economy. It is, after all, about twice the number of jobs that have been added every month since the beginning of the year.

So what's the FAIL? Only ten percent of those jobs were private sector jobs. 411,000 temps were hired for the census. Private sector hiring actually dropped from an average of about 200,000 jobs a month to about twenty percent of that.

If Chad's experience that most of those workers have already been laid off holds true for most of the census offices (the ones that aren't inflating their timesheets anyway - if I had a guess, there's some of both Chad's and James O'Keefe's experiences going on) then we're in for some very interesting employment numbers next month. Especially if we have another month of only hiring 41,000 real workers.

At least they hired the most obnoxious people they could find for census workers. (Chad notwithstanding, of course. Although he may be insulted to not be included in the most obnoxious.) I'm sitting at my desk in my home office one day, finally getting down to figuring out a pretty complex issue in some documentation, when the doorbell rings. I ignore it. It rings again. I ignore it again. Pounding starts on my door, I figure someone's house is on fire so I'd better check it out. The person at the door was a census worker, asking me if I knew who lived across the fucking street. And then she wouldn't leave when I told her I don't know their names. (I really don't, I know her first name and I know what kind of work her husband does, and I know they have obnoxious dogs. And they know I have guns. That's all we need to know about each other.) I literally had to start yelling at her to get off my property to get her to go away, and this was well after explaining to her that I was trying to work.

June 03, 2010

Let's start with "high paying" meaning apparently $45,000 and up. If that doesn't say something about the current economic environment, I don't know what does.

Now let's move on to "low stress". How the hell is being a civil engineer low stress? If you fuck up, a bridge collapses. A building falls down. Things go boom. Personally, I'd find that a wee bit stressful.

Then there's being a computer engineer. What the hell universe do the people who wrote the article live in where a computer programmer isn't under high stress? Hell, some of the big gaming companies got nailed a few years ago about making people work 70+ hours for weeks on end trying to hit deadlines. Tiny bit stressful.

Sure, neither of those are being cops or soldiers but I wouldn't call either of those low stress.

June 01, 2010

You know, if you think government is the center of national life,
government can do everything, then you're disappointed. But for those
of us who don't expect that of government, who know there are limits to
government power, then we're--you know, we--people say, "Oh, he should
do something. He should do something." James Carville says that. But
what exactly should he do? He doesn't have a degree in underwater
engineering. I don't expect government to do everything, and I don't
expect they will be able to do everything. And so we're going to have
to live with this, live with the awareness that there are limits to
what government can do.

I do think this is a big moment, though, the failure of the top
kill. I do think it's a big moment because we could be facing really
weeks or months of that image. And that image of the oil spewing out
will become the central image of the year. And for President Obama,
who's had a really heroic presidency {!?!??!-ed} for the first
year, now he's entering a period of a limited presidency--limits to his
power, limits to money. It's a different type of presidency, and that
image will be the core image of the year.

David, Chris Matthews and his tingly leg just called and said you are a bit over the top with your fanboy crush of Obama. Fuck you, pal. Fuck you and your schoolgirl obsessions for letting them cloud your perceptions.